One of the advantages of a REST architecture is that is makes it much easier to implement cross-language bindings. To wit, Sriram Krishnan has created a set of Azure bindings for the concurrent programming language, Erlang.

Erlang allows for massively scalable concurrency, often with millions of lightweight, thread-like components known as actors. Unfortunately, using Erlang requires rewriting all of your legacy code into a rather esoteric language. But there are other options, such as the little known CCR platform that was developed by .NET's robotics department.

Nanite is Engine Yard's latest addition to their cloud computing strategy: a "self assembling cluster of ruby processes" to form the backend of highly scalable web applications. We talked to its developer Ezra Zygmuntowicz and also got some news about Vertebra.

In this interview, Damien Katz talks about CouchDB, a distributed, fault tolerant, document oriented database developed by Apache Incubator. CouchDB is written in Erlang, and the database is accessed through an HTTP/JSON API. The database view engine is run on JavaScript, but other languages have been used like Ruby and Python.

In this interview filmed during QCon London 2008, Joe Armstrong, designer of Erlang, speaks on various aspects of the Erlang language, presenting its roots, how it compares with other languages and why it has become popular these days due to its native ability to scale on multi core systems.

Erlang virtual machine – BEAM – hosts an increasing number of languages. Reia, a Python/Ruby like scripting language and Lisp Flavoured Erlang have recently been released. Debasish Ghosh reflects on this trend while other authors try to outline other possible language variants inspired by Ruby or Haskell.

In this presentation from QCon London 2008, Brian Goetz discusses the difficulties of creating multithreaded programs correctly, incorrect synchronization, race conditions, deadlock, Software Transactional Memory, the history of concurrency, alternatives to threads, Erlang, Scala, and recommendations for concurrency in Java.

There has been a somewhat heated debate about Scala vs. Erlang on the blogosphere recently. The future will be multi-cored, and the question is how the multi-core crises will be solved. Scala and Erlang are two languages that aspire to be the solution, but they are a bit different. What are the pros and cons with their approaches?

At RailsConf 2008, Ezra Zygmuntowicz announced Vertebra, a next generation cloud computing platform that builds on Erlang, Ruby and XMPP. We talked to Ezra to learn about Vertebra, which will soon be open sourced.

We get more and more cores in our CPUs, but does our software run linearly faster? In most cases - no. We've hit a trend change when it comes to faster CPUs. We'll get more and more cores, but each core will be slower as the number of cores increase. In his talk, Joe Armstrong introduces Erlang and the ideas of Concurrent Oriented Programming which is one way to solve the problem.